Following rapid growth through acquisition, Cox Automotive needed to move beyond a collection of independently operating brands toward a genuinely unified company culture. Without shared values and cross-business collaboration behaviors, the company could not fully leverage its combined capabilities or deliver on its integrated value proposition.
Vivaldi designed and led a cultural transformation program that defined shared values and specific behaviors expected across all Cox Automotive businesses. The program was built around a participatory approach — involving employees at all levels in defining the culture they wanted — while aligning cultural values explicitly to business strategy.
The program created a positive employee engagement movement that spread across the company's businesses. Cross-business collaboration improved measurably, and Cox Automotive established a cohesive cultural identity that supported both organic growth and continued acquisition integration.
Cox Automotive partnered with Vivaldi to unify its rapidly-acquired portfolio of automotive brands under a shared culture aligned with business strategy. The participatory transformation program defined shared values and specific behaviors across the company, improving cross-business collaboration measurably and creating a cohesive cultural identity that supported both organic growth and continued acquisition integration.
Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises and the world’s largest automotive services and technology company, with brands including Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim, and vAuto. Serving over 40,000 dealer customers and hundreds of millions of car shoppers annually, Cox Automotive generates revenues exceeding $7 billion. The Atlanta-based company is privately held and operates across vehicle remarketing, dealer software, digital retail, and fleet management.
Vivaldi designed and led a transformation program that defined shared values and specific cross-business behaviors across Cox Automotive’s portfolio of acquired brands. The program produced a measurable improvement in cross-business collaboration, an employee engagement movement that spread across the organization, and a unified cultural identity that supported both organic growth and ongoing acquisition integration.
The program engaged employees at every level in defining the culture they wanted to work inside, rather than handing down a values framework from headquarters. By making the people who would have to live the culture also the people who shaped it, the transformation produced ownership at the levels of the organization where culture actually gets enforced or ignored, which is what separates cultural change from a values poster.
Acquisitions buy capability and customers, but they do not buy a shared way of working, which is what unlocks the cross-sell, talent mobility, and operational leverage the deal model usually depends on. Without an explicit cultural transformation, each acquired brand keeps operating as a separate company under the same logo, and the synergies that justified the acquisition price never fully materialize.
The discipline is to define values in terms of specific behaviors tied to specific strategic outcomes, so each value points to something the company actually needs people to do differently. When values are described abstractly, they end up in onboarding decks and nowhere else, while values described as behaviors get reinforced in performance reviews, hiring decisions, and operating rhythms, which is where strategic alignment is actually produced.
